Category Archives: enterprise mobility

The 2nd annual Future of Work Summit is currently taking place, with 130+ attendees discussing the latest trends in enterprise mobility management, collaboration, mobile device management, apps and file sync & share. With keynote sessions and industry leadership panel discussions from the likes of Aon, BBC, Greenpeace, Wipro, SAP, Telstra, Linklaters, and Ealing, Hammersmith & West London College, there has been a great deal of knowledge-sharing at the event, with more to come! Here is a selection of the best photos from the day so far:

Ahead of Future of Work Summit, we caught up with Peter Armstrong and Len Epp, co-founders of Dashcube, Innovation Sponsor of the event. In a fascinating, in-depth discussion, they explore their perspectives on the future workplace and technology, and their experience to date.

Peter Armstrong: At Future of Work, I am most looking forward to hearing the perspectives that different people we talk with have about the future of work. At Dashcube, we have been thinking about this for a long time, and building our thinking about the future of distributed collaboration into the product. We really value conferences such as Future of Work since they give us the chance to get out of the proverbial building and do the customer development process, talking with people and learning more about their business problems and testing our assumptions about what we are doing with our technology.

I believe the Future of Work means that distributed teams are not optional, and the tools and processes which need to evolve to support them can also be applied effectively to teams which have the luxury of being in the same building. I believe the Future of Work will be fantastic, since social forces such as so-called “millennial entitlement” will mean that people won’t settle for bad tools and oppressive processes. Fundamentally, the Future of Work will be about people, and about how better to use technology to connect people and then get out of the way.

Ovum: From a learning experience viewpoint, what has been your most valuable lesson in your working career, or your most successful failure?

Peter Armstrong: My most successful failure was trying to productize the concepts in my first book, Flexible Rails, into a commercial framework. While the framework was technically strong, largely due to the efforts of my cofounder, it failed spectacularly as a commercial product. However, the experience led to the formation of my boutique consultancy, which led to the creation of Leanpub, which led to me working with my old friend Len and to meeting Chris, and to us creating Dashcube together. In terms of lessons, the main lesson it taught me was that doing public-facing things that genuinely try to improve some small subset of the world can lead to totally unexpected successes with people you have never met.

Ovum: What technology would you like to see changing the way we do business in the future?

Peter Armstrong: I would love to see the Apple Watch and its inevitable imitators eliminate the security disaster and overstuffed wallet that is the reality with modern-day credit cards. Len wants it to open doors too, but if it just fixes payments then I’ll be happy. Paying for stuff is a disaster.

Ovum: Describe your ideal working environment 10 years from now?

Len Epp: Regarding wearables, I believe the biggest change in our working environments is that we are going to be using smartwatches as our keys, not just for unlocking doors, but also for unlocking our devices and even our apps. This will have a profound impact on the way every enterprise manages security for its people, physical assets, its IP and its data. Here’s a blog post I wrote a few weeks ago (before the Apple Watch launch) that goes into some more detail on how watches will become keys (and wallets): https://medium.com/@lenepp/why-smartwatches-should-be-keys-and-wallets-e141facb95ad

Ovum: What in your opinion will be the next big change in the way that we work and the way in which businesses engage with their employees – and specifically the way IT has to service their customers?

Peter Armstrong: Businesses need to realize that they need to market themselves to their existing employees far more than to prospective new ones. Continue reading →

Martin Sadler is the Head of IT and Shared Services at Walsall Council. He has led the IT service for 7 years and delivered significant technical projects and cultural change; prior to that he worked for Fujitsu Services in the Retail and Financial services. This gives him a rare perspective of being able to look at the Future of Work through the eyes of a supplier, enterprise and public sector agency. He is a devotee of home grown solutions, open source products and anything that make life simpler or better value. We caught up with him to talk about this, about his role as a public sector IT leader and about his thoughts on the industry.

“My most valuable experience is that some people will only be happy if they have something to complain about”

Firstly, when thinking about the Future of Work Summit, Martin is “most looking forward to hearing more from people who are ahead of the work anywhere curve. I am discussing the move to mobility and smarter working in local government at Future of Work; I believe that I have experiences that others do not need to repeat”.

“My most valuable experience is that some people will only be happy if they have something to complain about. This led to the need to do changes sequentially in order to pinpoint what the real issue is”.

“Respond quickly; have integrity; explain thoroughly”

The complexity of a local council is unique in business terms, and presents a lot of challenges for an IT leader. Martin knows this as well as anyone, affirming that “[a council] has conflicting purposes and more diverse activities than any reasonable organisation would be expected to do”. To manage this challenge, he sets in place clear generic activities: “respond quickly; have integrity; explain thoroughly; with a huge degree of flexibility in how and when services are provided”.

There is currently a big drive towards smarter working within the public sector, with a need for increased efficiency in IT delivery, which, while exciting in many ways, presents a challenge in itself. As Martin puts it, “The diversity and number of legacy systems is a real impediment as is the pace of suppliers to convert their applications to be web based. This is then hampered by the price of providing a hosted solution”. And then, paraphrasing Einstein, “never underestimate the ability of groups of people to do stupid things”.

On a more positive note, we spoke about what Martin’s most rewarding project of his career has been: the Rolling out of Thin Clients across Walsall Council, which he describes as “one of the most exciting things I have achieved. The mix of experimenting with new technology, stretching the limits of what is possible and seeing the staff develop the solutions has been fantastic”.

SAP Jam is Silver Sponsor at Future of Work Summit. The SAP Jam solution facilitates collaboration at every level of your business. Here’s what it’s all about.

Enterprises can claim a complimentary pass for Future of Work, by registering here. Take a look at the event agenda with just one click. Ovum has a strong legacy in this area, with many years research experience in enterprise mobility, collaboration, file sync and share, mobile device management and mobile application management. We are continually working with the people and organisations who are seeing the Future of Work become a reality. Moreover, our Future of Work, Mobile First and BYOX events have seen fantastic discussion with the leading lights in this growing industry sector.

Who will be the major players in the workplace of the future? What does future workplace technology look like, and who will make best use of it? Join us to find out.

While the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) can sometimes amount to a bit of a screen-measuring contest, there are always things to be learned from it. Here are the top three things that enterprise IT department managers can learn from the show, in the opinion of Fredric Paul from Network World.

Lesson Number 1: Size Matters.

The 2014 CES was all about really, really big screens. We’re talking television sets the size of Jumbotrons and smartphones the size of tablets.

The giant TVs were all running at 4K or Ultra HD resolutions that demand huge amount of bandwidth but display stunning levels of detail, even when you get right up close to the screen. While they may not be an immediate hit with price-conscious consumers, you can be sure that they’re raising the bar on what employees expect from the displays they use in the workplace. Even as workers increasingly rely on tablets and super-portable Ultrabooks with relatively small screens, when they sit down and plug in at the office, they’re increasingly going to demand big-screen, high-resolution monitors on their desktops.

In the world of portable devices, it seems increasingly clear that small-screen smarpthones are going the way of flip phones. There were plenty of companies showing models with 6-inch screens, and no one was making fun of their comically large dimensions. Samsung even showed its Galaxy Note Pro — a tablet with a whoppping 12.2-inch, 4-megapixel display.

Lesson Number 2: Wearable computing will change everything.

Sure, the influx of wearable computing devices has so far been more hype than happening, more promise than performance. Most of the devices now on the market seem more proof of concept than polished product. And frankly, most of the new offerings I saw at the show didn’t change that assessment. And yet, the sheer numbers of new devices — and the intense interest in the devices by the attendees — helped convince me that we’re seeing the beginnings of a fundamental new category of products.

As that market matures and truly useful devices become available, they’re going to change the way we relate to computing yet again, and enterprise IT will have to adjust. We’ve still got a little time… Google Glass isn’t the answer, the Pebble and Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch are too ugly to take seriously (even the new Pebble Steel), and Apple’s Smartwatch is still only a rumor. But in the next year or two, wearable devices will be finding their way into enterprise networks just like smartphones did, and IT had better be ready.

Lesson Number 3: Connectivity is everything.

Buying bigger devices is only half of the equation. The continued increase in the size, number, types, and data requirements of these new devices will continue to put unprecendented pressure on connectivity and bandwidth. That’s true in the home, for mobile devcies in the field, and in enterprise offices and data centers.

Keeping all those devices humming and connecting without delays is going to be a key challenge for many companies in the coming years. Enterprises may find them spending big dollars to boost their available connectivity solutions, both wired and wireless, to let employees and customers access and create the HD content that looks so darn good on all those giant screens.

Vendors at all levels of the communications stack are pushing a wide variety of technologies to help make that happen, and it’s not yet clear which ones will predominate. But it’s a safe bet that what enterprises have in place now is not going to be good enough going forward.